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That has been a * value-added feature* for years. Since at least 2014 when I started buying 'Chinese' Android phones. Many sellers advertise it as an advantage over their competition.

Not of interest to me since I install LineageOS over the top, but useful to very many people and not at all 'scary' to them. Why is it any scarier than trusting the OEM's build? In fact the seller has more reputation to lose if he does something nefarious. The OEM can just shrug and issue a press release if they get caught installing dodgy stuff; a seller might go out of business.

Those types of sellers couldn't care less about reputation. Their customers don't come to them for reputation, but rather their low prices.

Here's the rule-of-thumb, these small time sellers are interested in sales, not pwning you. They may counterfeit but they aren't going to bother installing backdoors nor are they sophisticated enough to do so. They may inadvertently do so out of incompetence but that was not their goal.

People who really do want to pwn you wear suits and sit in large offices and they will get you to do it voluntarily by signing a EULA.

Seems like a market opportunity: if you're working on thin margins, why not take some NSA cash?

Good luck doing that in China. It is provably the best and quickest way to end up in an unmarked grave or a secret prison and doom your family at the same time.

The manufacturers may be based in China, but the importers, distributors, and sellers here discussed are not necessarily so. And I suspect you could happily replace NSA in the parent comment with any private or government intelligence agency of your choice. I wouldn't expect an unscrupulous distributor to suddenly grow scruples about precisely where the cash comes from.

People so often rationalize away a plausible scenario of government surveillance by showing how it would require someone to be an irrational actor -- under a simplified, incomplete set of assumptions about the world. I do not understand why, after Snowden. Humans are not rational, and you cannot exhaustively list all the possible forces that might affect someone's decision.

You don't need NSA cash, you just need a place that will pay your X dollars to put in their advertising / monitoring malware on the device. The reincarnation of the browser bar.

That, however, is something your users will notice and complain about (maybe).

> a seller might go out of business.

Hah! And by that you mean they might change their name slightly and simply re-list all of the same stuff on AliExpress or Amazon?

Sprint OEM Android phones had Carrier IQ installed which logged everything. That was years ago too.

How do you install LineageOS on a random Chinese android device? How do you find the builds? I guess LineageOS only supports a handful of devices. Just curious about the process. I might as well start doing the same.

Going to the list of supported devices and doing a stupid count (-> document.querySelectorAll("table.device tr") - I didn't see a count after a few seconds, so..), I'd say it's a bit more than a handful. :) 237 unless I messed up.

1: https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/

But compare the length of the lists for e.g. Samsung and LG with those for Huawei or Xiaomi. You're much less likely to find a ROM for a random Chinese device than for the large brand phones that are somewhat common in the US. It might be because Chinese manufacturers are even less concerned about the GPL (I once tried to look for kernel sources for my Huawei device and only found dead links) or maybe Chinese developers are less involved in the LineageOS community, but it's more likely than not that there won't be any LineageOS build available.

See comment above

Which comment are you referring to? A link would be helpful.

You can normally buy the complete source code together with CAD models for all the plastic parts, circuit board designs and datasheets for all the chips for $50 on those super dodgy chinese source code exchange websites.

The only problem then is typically getting it all to compile will be many person-months of work. There will typically be hundreds of toolchains, many missing, lots of build scripts missing or wrong, etc.

It's still nowhere as near as Ubuntu on a desktop, my Android device isn't in the list and who knows how many weeks of debugging I would need to make it work...

Surely that's something I would do always. But imagine getting a non branded Chinese phone with decent specs and being able to put ROM of your choice! That would be fun!

Well anyone who was using Linux in the late 90s is probably used to ignoring OEM brochures and instead picking hardware based on compatibility.

I've had good success with Zuk and Snapdragon-based and Elephone Mediatek-based phones

You don't buy a 'random' phone, you start your shopping process from the list of devices supported by LineageOS.

Not really! The thing is from a broader perspective it seems the popular Chinese brands have relatively cheap smartphones but if you are from any of the South Asian countries, these phones are still pretty expensive for us. There are lots of small local companies that sell re-branded phones imported from China and those are even cheaper.

Xiami phones have two officials ROM from the manufacturer, chinese and international.

The chinese ROM is Asian languages and English only. It is loaded with the usual Asian apps instead of google play. The phone is not usable out of the box for a westerner, for instance you don't have a typical English keyboard. You can install google play by following the instructions.

The international ROM has 10+ European languages. It comes with google play and the usual apps pre installed.

Both ROM can be downloaded from the manufacturer website but you need special hardware and possibly an unlock code to swap them.

It's possible that the importer gave an international version that is perfectly legit, or that he installed google play by himself, which is also legit. The ROM can be checked in the about page.

Some re sellers might replace the system with a fake OS loaded with adware/spyware but that's a different problem.

I think it's just bad. I use Lineage OS on all my devices -- I just bought a Tab S2[1] because it's among the initial round of devices supported by LOS15.1. It kind of feels like being put on notice.

Chances are it'll be cracked sooner rather than later, but installing a custom ROM[2] is difficult enough as it is. It seems super unlikely to be a reaction to imports from China, which remain a niche phenomenon. And it's pointless anyway if they end up cracking it.

At that point it'll only affect people who sideload the Google stuff on devices they only have limited control over, aka Amazon customers.

[1] Which presumably won't be affected since it's a certified device; my phone's not, though.

[2] Previously known as installing an operating system.

> Chances are it'll be cracked sooner rather than later, but installing a custom ROM[2] is difficult enough as it is

Not permanently - the "Google Services" layer is continually updated and any crack would be the beginning of a cat-and-mouse game.

> Which I find quite disturbing. That a seller (even on Amazon) could import cheaper "china" only phones and sell it to me as the EU/US version. (it's basically incorrectly labeled)

The bigger problem here is the fact that the device had Gapps preloaded as system private apps, which have special privileges and can do things which normal apps can't. They also get permissions granted automatically.

That's usually not a problem with Google sofware, but whoever preloaded Gapps could preload pretty much any kind of app which would have full system privileges and ability to hide itself.

First you would have to crack Google public key system or modify your Android to not check signatures on installed packages.

There are easier and sneakier ways to install malware on a phone you control completely that do not require messing with cryptography at all.

Any additional malicious APK next to Gapps wouldn't have to be signed with Google keys to do harm.

I'm curious to know what mechanism allows users of custom ROMs to register their device IDs, but not users of pre-installed ROMs on "unlicensed devices".

The article says you have to tie the device ID to your google account. Presumably they don't have access to you google account.

It also says the device ID is regenerated at every factory reset, so it can't have been pre-registered with Google.

Wow, I never realized that it's effectively impossible to tell if an Android device has a custom ROM intentionally set up to not look like a custom ROM.

Is there any chance of Android gaining a "Secure Boot" logic—not in the sense of desktop PCs, but in the sense of ChromeOS devices? (i.e. not that you can't boot custom ROMs, but that you'd get a click-through warning each boot from the hardware boot loader that the OS signature check has failed.)

> Is there any chance of Android gaining a "Secure Boot" logic—not in the sense of desktop PCs, but in the sense of ChromeOS devices? (i.e. not that you can't boot custom ROMs, but that you'd get a click-through warning each boot from the hardware boot loader that the OS signature check has failed.)

Android has that already. Vendors just patch over that as well. As do many custom rom users, I’ve patched the unlocked warning out on my devices as well.

> but in the sense of ChromeOS devices?

You can fairly easily flash a custom ROM onto a ChromeOS device and remove the boot-up warning. It does require taking apart the device quite significantly, and then flashing different u-boot firmware using a firmware flasher. But it's definitely possible. The problem with ChromeOS devices' "secure boot" is that it is disabled if you want to boot something not trusted in the firmware, so if you have a custom OS you have to disable one of the main security features of the device (unless you flash different firmware onto the device).

Oh, and Android already has this feature. But as with ChromeOS you can disable the warning if you re-lock the bootloader. However, each time you unlock (or relock in the case of Pixel devices) the bootloader, the device will be reset to factory defaults.

> Oh, and Android already has this feature. But as with ChromeOS you can disable the warning if you re-lock the bootloader.

Ah, I was basically imagining that there was some separate "bootloader" stage sitting on a chip that can't be user-flashed (and is hopefully even fully WORM, like old school OTP-NVM PROMs) which would handle the secure-boot logic.

So I guess I should rephrase my hypothetical technology as "like Secure Boot in x64-platform PCs—where the CPU checks the BIOS signature and then the BIOS checks the boot loader signature and then the boot loader checks the OS signature—and where the CPU and BIOS can't be tampered with after the factory, thus guaranteeing the sanctity of the bootloader—but where a failure of the boot loader to verify the OS just results in a click-through boot warning."

What you are describing is Intel BootGuard. [1]

There is a signature burned into efuses in the CPU that is used as a root of trust for the BIOS, which implements SecureBoot.

In theory this protects the boot chain from tampering. In practice vendor BIOS implementations are usually buggy garbage, so while you cannot replace the BIOS (because then the signature would fail and the platform won't boot) it may be possible to circumvent the security features by exploiting some bug in the IBV code or in their UEFI implementation.

[1] https://patrick.georgi.family/2015/02/17/intel-boot-guard/

This was fixed years ago by Google on their devices, but as always every manufacturer decides to reinvent the wheel with varying results:

https://source.android.com/security/verifiedboot/

https://www.androidauthority.com/verified-boot-warnings-in-a...

You mean something like Verified Boot? Pixel devices have always had this and it's part of AOSP. It also has rollback protection.

https://android.googlesource.com/platform/external/avb/+/mas...

https://source.android.com/security/verifiedboot/

Wow, I never realized that it's effectively impossible to tell if an Android device has a custom ROM intentionally set up to not look like a custom ROM.

Just like root, that's the whole point --- to run an OS that's otherwise completely compatible with the apps and everything else, but is customised in the way you want it.

My OnePlus3 running LineageOS does this. I haven't checked to see if it's possible to patch out.

It's very confusing seeing all of these HNers clamouring for more locked down bootloaders. It doesn't seem to be in the spirit of this community at all.

Re locking boot-loader after any aftermarket changes to stock android generally results in trouble. I wonder whether there's more to this aspect of the story.

> Well this is neither bad nor good. Because custom Roms will have a hatch out of it.

Given most of Google's other recent moves related to Android, I wouldn't count on that escape hatch being around for too long. More likely they're offering it as a short-term transition and will find a 'reason' to shut it once they've quantified the impact as minimal in a couple of years.

I doubt that. Kicking the Rom builders out of the Android Eco-System would probably cause the rise of a new mobile OS. So as long as Google doesn't want to end its monopoly they won't do that.

No it wouldn't. You're seriously underestimating the resources and money it would take to even attempt that. Google has an army of Android developers working on all aspects of the OS from design, security, tooling, architecture, infrastructure, features, bug fixes, etc. Others have tried and spectacularly failed because it's hard. Besides, you'll never have the developer support.

Maybe a smaller army would be a good thing, at least in terms of API stability.

What I want to know is why isn't Google allowing users to uninstall some of the apps that come with the devices? You can only disable them.

Surely they can't still use the excuse that deleting those apps will "mess with the OEM's image", now that Project Treble exists, and everything can be put into their own separate modules?

If they do use that excuse, I don't buy it. It's likely an internal decision to cater to their partners who don't want their users to uninstall those apps. But it's really a petty move from the OEMs, too, because if I'm willing to disable that app, then I might as well uninstall it, because clearly I don't intend to ever use it.

There are multiple partitions on android.

The system partition is a read only partition that gets updated only in firmware updates.

Apps can also be packaged on that partition.

Since you can't delete files from it, you cmhave the ability to disable a system application.

That deletes the updates (which are on the data partition) then disables the app.

with a rooted phone I was able to delete such a system app using pm uninstall, was this doing a remount,rw on the system partition to remove it under the hood, or how does this work then?

Because I thought that was more of a "you pay us to make your app unremovable preinstalled on all of our phones"-thing rather than anything technical.

It works by actually deleting the data from the system partition, that's not a big deal.

But what happens is that there isn't any way using just the device to reset it back to factory defaults, and that's a problem now. If your average joe can uninstall the play store by accident, they then can't get it reinstalled again without a PC and some technical knowhow.

By making it so you can only "disable" preinstalled apps, you limit the damage that can be done, and because of partitions you don't really harm the user at all (because that space wouldn't be reclaimed if fully deleted anyway).

It's also why most "preinstalled" apps are now just a 4kb placeholder that makes google play go and download the latest version of the app the second it's connected, so if you "disable" it you are only left with a 4kb "skeleton" of an app there.

Yep which makes sense for play store etc., except samsung pre-installs the facebook app in this way. I would be surprised if facebook does pay samsung nothing for this. Similar how google pays mozilla to keep google as the default search engine.

> What I want to know is why isn't Google allowing users to uninstall some of the apps that come with the devices?

Interesting that you are "blaming" Google for this instead of vendors, when (usually) it vendors who make their crap uninstallable. Or do you see lot of uninstallable stuff in AOSP?

A significant number of Google apps are mandatorily non-uninstallable on all Android phones (including Pixels), such as Gmail, Play Books, Play Movies, Play Music, Gmail, Google Maps, formerly G+ and Hangouts. I haven't used Android in a while, but I wouldn't be surprised if Allo and Duo have been added to the list.

Most of the bloatware problem is, in fact, Google's apps. If you have duplicates on your phone, it's because Samsung or whoever else made their own apps, but were forced to ship Google's anyways.

> A significant number of Google apps are mandatorily uninstallable on all Android phones (including Pixels),

Point taken and conceded.

Although I'd point out a small subtlety in the matter that they are definitely not mandatorily non-uninstallable on all Android phones, namely those that do not ship Gapps to begin with.

Phones running Android that don't ship with GApps aren't allowed to be called "Android phones". Being able to use the Android trademark requires that you pass Android certification, a part of which requires including the GApps on the handset (and I expect they even require that you make some of them non-uninstallable).

The bloatware is the Samsung apps. If Samsung wants to go that route, they could choose to use the open source version of Android along with their own apps.

What's the difference between Samsung's Email app and Google's GMail app? What makes Samsung's bloatware but Google's not in your mind?

They're both pre-installed apps that some people might or might not need that you can't uninstall.

Those Google apps are part of the default Android experience. And I'd prefer a consistent experience as possible from phone to phone. It should however it possible for the end user to install any other apps of their own preference. I certainly don't want to manufacturers and carriers to force them upon me.

You bought a Samsung phone, why wouldn't you have Samsung apps? Apple phones have Apple apps. Everyone need not have a single company's apps shoved forcibly down their throats.

> Apple phones have Apple apps.

> Everyone need not have a single company's apps shoved forcibly down their throats.

So it looks like Apple is shoving their apps down our throats.

Don't you expect Apple phones to have Apple apps and Samsung phones to have Samsung apps? Why is Google supposed to be the dictator of experience on a Samsung device?

And in a world where 85% of phones run Android, do you consider that an upside? That people only have the choice between Apple or Google experiences, and no others?

Because they created the OS. If Samsung has an issue with it then why don't they leave Android and start using their own OS?

Samsung is certainly within their rights to take the free portion of Android and replace the rest of the missing stuff with they own funky little apps.

Samsung's email app is crap and additional to the google app, while gmail feels like a useful default email app.

It's a super fine line that is basically just preference, and they are both bloatware in a technical sense (can't uninstall it).

By uninstallable you mean ununinstallable?

Yes

I made the same mistake in my reply. :( But my edit button still worked so I just fixed it.

System partition is read only. Updates in modern android are not file based but block based (to allow dm-verity to work, since before and after each update every block's content is guaranteed). If you remount /system as read write even once, updates can no longer apply, since block diffs applied to a filesystem different than expected will almost certainly do bad things.

Any full uninstall of a system app would require remounting /system as rw.

What is your beef with "disabling"? Under the hood it is the same thing as uninstall, minus the file removal or the actual apk. App doesn't run, has no permissions, is never loaded/mapped into RAM.

> Any full uninstall of a system app would require remounting /system as rw.

Why do Google Apps have to be installed to the system partition anyway?

I have tried several email clients and image viewers from Google's app store, — all of them work fine without being system apps.

So will they be present after a full device reset. The alternative's to download them after reset. But that would not always work if you were in an area with a bad connection.

The system partition is simply the factory image, nothing more nothing less. It doesn't inherently mean privileged, either. There's 2 different app locations in the system partition, 1 for real system apps with system privileges (/system/priv-app) and one for just preinstalled stuff with the same privileges you'd get from installing from the play store (/system/app)

> What I want to know is why isn't Google allowing users to uninstall some of the apps that come with the devices? You can only disable them.

Other people already responded and stated the reason, that wasn't directly stated. In addition to those apps being on system read-only partition and not being easy to modify it you should also know that the app doesn't take any extra space from your data partition (obviously, when app is disabled and all its data was cleared)

What is annoying me most are those apps that you can't disable :/ also they could either make it easier to disable or make it diabled by default and on first boot offer user to enable it if they want it, but that won't happen because they want to ham fist those apps to us.

Unless it's explicitly described as EU/US version (I assume there's no difference in quality or hardware), I don't see the problem in buying a "China only" phone?

4G radio bands may differ - bottom table here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LTE_frequency_bands

Sometimes they have more features for cheaper - dual SIM and NFC come to mind. US phones are very crippled in general.

What US phones don’t come with NFC these days? Dual sim is a niche feature that doesn’t make sense in the states.

A US citizen consultant working for weeks abroad, buying a local sim card. That doesn't make sense to you?

Niche maybe, but certainly useful enough to be included.

I worked abroad for 12 years, 10 even in China where dual sims are even more common. Even my Chinese colleagues would often use an iPhone and just switch the SIM in the airplane, it isn’t that hard. Dual sims are actually meant for (a) people with a personal and business SIM or (b) people cheating on their wife (so an official SIM and a SIM for the xiaosan(s)). Both very niche even in China.

Dual SIM simply isn’t really a feature that would drive phone sales in the states.

The Moto G5+ doesn't have NFC if you buy it in the US. It has NFC if you buy it anywhere else in the world.

But there are lots of phones in the US market with no NFC: BLU Grand M2, Zenfone 4 Max, LG K3, etc.

Put a european sim card in, and support will come back... You don't even have to reboot!

It's simply a software lock.

NFC has various patents.

The Moto E4 Plus for example will only activate it's NFC if you put a sim card from one of the big european carriers. If you put in a sim card from a small carrier or a USA carrier, suddenly all mention of NFC vanishes from all menus.

Huh, I really thought we did away with band incompatibility (with phones supporting most of them, and them being globally standardized) :(

They are standardized and oftentimes available in hardware but carriers disable them for obvious reasons.

Sorry, what are the "obvious" reasons? Why should my phone supplier care to stop me using my phone abroad, say?

Cause they can charge you more for international branded phones.

Why doesn't the market work around such companies that are so antagonistic to their customers?

do they really disable them? I always thought that LTE modems only come with certain frequency bands.

I can slightly remember that the iphone 5 only had 2 or 3 frequency bands while at the beginning of lte some providers did use the frequency which the iphone had more often, so some providers had better lte support. But I can hardly remember, it was some years ago and my provider switch basically came within the lte rollout. I mean it probably also consumes more energy to scan more bands (ok that could be solved with software)

To clarify, on MIUI devices one can install Google Play at anu time without having root or system fs access, though the author's concern still stands.

by definition, only the manufacturer can "lock it back"

if the manufacturer keys are in the open, then it is an even worse state of affairs.

who downvoted me should read up on how a signed bootloader works

the english language already has characters like commas and periods to delineate sentences, inserting newlines and '>' characters is only breaking the flow. this is really bad form.

The newlines are for markdown not to automatically join the sentences, and the `>` is a standard internet quote colloquialism.

Initial > lines indicate quoted material. This is extremely common in e-mail. Because the developers of Hacker News have chosen not to implement block-quote markup, this is what we are stuck with. (The alternative being unreadable-on-mobile code blocks.)

English doesn't have a standard way to do block quotes. And you definitely need block quotes when it's an entire paragraph containing its own quotes. Using ">" is just fine as a way to accomplish that goal.

This is Markdown formatting. The comment boxes on reddit support it, as does the text post box on hacker news, but not the comment boxes. A shame really.